Separation of Church and Ads

I'm not so sure I like the new look for LJ. It's difficult to tell where
the ads end and the articles begin. I feel that it acts as a distraction to
the reader and hides valuable information among the noise of advertising.

—
William W. Atkinson

Blackjack in Fewer Draws

I just read the “Writing a Shell Game” by Dave Taylor in the March 2006
issue of Linux Journal, and the technique he used for shuffling cards
seems somewhat inefficient and incorrect. Taylor is randomly selecting
cards from a fixed array. A far better algorithm would be a swap-based
shuffle, where you walk along the deck, swapping each card with a randomly
chosen other card. The code to implement this is shorter than Taylor's
“choose until bored, then scoop up the rest” method. In bash, you could
do it with:

No need for creating a second deck from a first—this shuffles in-place.
Still, I'd like to thank Dave for the article, because although I know I've encountered bash arrays before, somehow I just could never get the hang of the syntax. His article spells it out in an understandable and useful way.

—
Steve Fink

Dave Taylor replies:
Hey! That's some cool code you've written there, Steve. Thanks for sharing
it. In terms of whether my algorithm was optimal, well, um, err, I've
been too busy figuring out whether we were going to implement Atlantic
City or Vegas rules to worry about how well the shuffle worked.

Substantiate Your Dislikes about GNOME

I'm a KDE refugee and much prefer GNOME, so I was surprised at the depth
of [Nicholas Petreley's] dislike [see the March 2006 etc/rant column]. It'd be nice to know what
objective standards he's measuring GNOME against. I'm not suggesting
that GNOME is “the best”--for example, I too dislike Nautilus and usually
install another file manager.

—
Sonia Hamilton

I will be more specific in a future rant. In the meantime, as far as what
a user sees, GNOME is a window manager, panels and file manager. The
minimalistic window manager, Metacity, doesn't have much to do with
GNOME. The panels get more minimalistic with each release. The only
substantial component of GNOME is Nautilus, and you replace it. What
does that tell you? —Ed.

What a GNOME Needs

I think the lesson to be learned from both open-source and commercial
software is that everyone has different needs. [GNOME should come up
with a method] that would allow people to choose just what level of
features are available to users, what the defaults are and so on. As
distro makers get a better sense of the varying classes of users, they
can continue to fine-tune their policies without having to be full GUI
developers. And as users themselves grow, they can be given the option
of moving to a more advanced GUI policy.
This would be an elegant way of satisfying everyone's needs. And it keeps
in line with what I think of as real choice in the traditional UNIX sense.

—
Danny

GNOME Does Not Offer Choice

The only real complaint I have against GNOME is that it doesn't support
no-auto-raise-on-focus. You Google it, and you find letters that are
six or seven years old asking when it will be available in GNOME, with the
GNOME developers pretty much ignoring the request or saying,
“never”.
So to the people who say that GNOME offers choice, ask them why you
can't choose to have the focus in a window that is partially occluded?
If you get the Microsoftian response of “Why would you want
that?”,
then you have demonstrated that they really don't care about choice.
And here I find myself at the end of the letter, apparently disagreeing
with Nick! Choice does matter, and GNOME bites precisely because it
fails to offer it.

—
Bill

My sentiments exactly. As per the previous letter, I'd like to see a
desktop that “just works” but makes it easy to customize it to the Nth
degree if I so choose—Ed.

In Defense of GNOME

On the defensive, GNOME has the ability to do everything I need/want. It's
a simple and elegant design, which means I don't need to customize it
and rip out applications to slim it down. For me, at least, it is very
intuitive when I need to make a change or add something to it. The biggest
priority for me is system resources; it is not uncommon for my computer to
be pushing the max limit because of the magnitude of the programs I run.

—
Chris Stackpole

You make a good point about GNOME using fewer resources than KDE.
However, when I really want to minimize the resources used by a desktop, I
run IceWM or Fluxbox. To each his own—Ed.

Make Innovation Not Duplication

[There is] a real challenge to those who design user interfaces for Linux.
In order for Linux truly to eclipse Microsoft on the desktop, it is
not enough to be “as good as Windows”. It has to set a new paradigm,
one in which productivity surpasses anything possible with Windows.

To paraphrase your comments [see etc/rant, March 2006]: choice is nice, but it's not an end in
itself. If you have only crap to choose from, then choice means nothing.
We don't need to have a choice among user interfaces that are basically
patterned after what Microsoft has established. We need to be able
to choose a better way of doing things with a computer in general. We
need a better paradigm of user interface. We need something that really
emulates the way we think as humans, and not how Microsoft believes we
should think.

—
Ken Peterson

Make Raves Not Rants

I've been a subscriber for five years or so.
If the badgering rants of Petreley continue, I'm canceling.
In fact, I don't want to read any rants. I like raves.

—
John Elliott

We print raves. See the raves about the rant column, for
example—Ed.

KOffice Live Links

I'm a happy reader of LJ next to also being a core programmer of KWord
and several of the other KOffice components. As your article went over
a core feature [see the February 2006 etc/rant column], and you apparently missed some aspects of it, I would
like to invite you to do a more thorough review of the capabilities
of KOffice. In direct reference to your article, I can inform you that
in KOffice the OLE kind of embedding is actually done quite innovatively
(since 1999 already), and much like you have witnessed in EIOffice,
there is a way to keep the embedded document external so that the chart
and spreadsheet data is updated whenever the external document is edited.

—
Thomas Zander

I couldn't find the way to do what you described. It obviously isn't as
simple as the EIOffice method, which is simply “copy” and
then “paste
link”—Ed.

Boobies out of Place

I found the cartoon with reference to “boobies” out of place in a
professional magazine. It was hard for me to enjoy reading the March 2006 issue
of Linux Journal. My mind kept wandering to such places as pondering
if my coworkers were thinking about my “boobies” while I was trying to
convey sophisticated technical material, perhaps in defense of our Linux
operating systems.

—
Linda Hedges

Why Isn't etc/rant LSB-Compliant?

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to call your column
“var/rant” rather than
“etc/rant”? Given the context of the column, it's not implied that one
should take the content as fact, but rather coincidental output based
on certain circumstances.
Just a thought....

—
Ken Peterson

You're probably right, but you gave it much more thought than I
did—Ed.

Skype Hype

In the January 2006 issue of Linux Journal, (Home Projects) there was an
article regarding using a Linux-based Skype Server for your home telephone
service [see Andrew Sheppard's “Build a Linux-Based Skype Server
for Your Home Phone System”]. I set up the server using Fedora Core 3, following the article
every step, until I completed installing SkypeMate. Long story short,
it didn't work. Please help.

—
Jimmy

Andrew Sheppard replies:
Linux is, sadly, the poor cousin of Windows in terms of hardware driver
support. However, there's an open-source project for Linux to provide
independent drivers and support for the Yealink B2K USB/PSTN phone
adapter. Here are the links: savannah.nongnu.org/projects/usbb2k-api and
memeteau.free.fr/usbb2k.

The default mode may be different depending on what version of the B2K
adapter you have, and who re-badged it (they all come from the Yealink
factory, as far as I can tell). In my case, leaving the PSTN line
unplugged will leave the adapter in USB mode by default.

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With gnome on FedoraCore 3, I open RedHat Main Menu -> Preferences -> Windows and check "Select windows when the mouse moves over them" and leave "Raise selected windows after an interval" unchecked. I can type in partially occluded windows, although clicking in a window still raises it.